Fascinating—the Welsh diaspora. I'm a Londoner. I come from a Welsh family in south-west London. I was very active in the London Welsh community before moving to Wales to go to university. So, I have a personal interest in this. I'm also writing a book at the moment about second-generation identities in England. I go to diasporic events a lot. I was in Coventry, actually, over the weekend in a Welsh language event on the Friday night, which was actually held between the Welsh and the Ukrainian community in Coventry, which was fascinating.
In terms of what it means for public policy, the first thing to say is that our linguistic community does extend beyond the borders of Wales. We don't know how many Welsh speakers there are outside Wales. We think there are probably about 50,000 to 100,000 Welsh speakers from Wales living in other parts of the UK who speak Welsh, but we have no way to prove that. But that is our gambit. We also have, in England, a number of people—again, we don't how much, but we think probably 10,000, 15,000—who are second-generation Welsh speakers. These are people who have never lived in Wales, who were born and brought up in England—they speak Welsh. Often they're fluent in Welsh, but they struggle with writing Welsh, for example—they have a particular profile. But there also exists in England, in particular, too people without Welsh heritage who use the Welsh language and contribute to Welsh community activities. In Manchester, for example, there's a Welsh language author, called Simon Chandler, who, really, does much of the community leadership there. He's a Welsh language novelist. He's not of Welsh heritage, he's from England; he's always lived there and makes a huge contribution.
So, the question is, if we do have between 100,000 to 150,000 Welsh speakers outside Wales, primarily in England, 90 per cent in England, at a time when we know that technology means that we can actually look beyond the purely physical in terms of geography, is there anything more that these people could be doing to contribute to the language community? Because if we do have, let's say, one in six Welsh speakers outside Wales, that's actually quite a significant body of people for a minority-language community. I don't think that, in the past, they have contributed as much as might have happened. I think we should look at that. I think there's an argument too in terms of economic development in Wales. That is to say, were the connections between Wales and the diaspora to be stronger, would some of these people be more likely to come back to Wales? I have no academic evidence to offer you on this, but common sense and the rule of thumb suggest that, maybe, if people were in closer contact with Wales and Welsh culture, they might be more likely to make that life choice, although we don't know that. I think that's quite interesting.
I think it's interesting too, philosophically, in terms of a wider debate about heritage languages in the UK. Because my own personal identity is as a Welsh speaker living in Wales, because I live in Wales now and I speak Welsh, but my personal identity is also of the speaker of a heritage language from London, because that's my personal background when I was a Welsh speaker. I spoke Welsh to my mother. I was taught to write Welsh by the deputy head of the comprehensive school that I attended, who happened to be the daughter, born and brought up in England, of the minister of Clapham Junction's Welsh chapel, so a completely informal, ad hoc setting, and really it's out of a series of accidents like that that I've ended up in Wales. There is an argument that if there are people like me, knocking around in England—maybe not everybody would agree it's a particularly good idea that you have more people like me—moving to Wales, but I think there's something there to look at.
So, we're going to take a realistic view of this. We understand that this is outside the territory of Wales. We understand therefore that it is not our aim to be committing or suggesting that we commit, or making recommendations that we commit large amounts of public expenditure to this field—I don't think that's appropriate—but there could be quite small changes we could make that could be significant. For example, if we do think that there's a problem with literacy amongst speakers of Welsh as a heritage language in England, how much would it really cost to be having a couple of classes online looking at that? And were that to be successful, would that be useful in the context of heritage languages in Wales itself? I think that's quite interesting in the context of multicultural Wales and, actually, in England too. That's the sort of thing we could look at.
I'd also like to look, perhaps, at what you might call some of the unintended accidents of devolution, and they are unintended and they are accidents. There are things like situations where you have something like the Welsh Music Prize, for example, which is an excellent competition, but if you're from my background—I was born and brought up in England, and I speak Welsh—if I were to move back to London and I were to rather surprisingly form a Welsh language band and to sing, then under current rules, because I wasn't from Wales or born in Wales, I would be unable to compete in the Welsh Music Prize. Now, that is funded by the Welsh Government, in part at least. That's not a conspiracy on the part of the Welsh Music Prize, I want to emphasise that; it's what I would call an oversight.
But these oversights may be things that we can look at. I hope it would be useful for people from my background and for the Welsh language in general in Wales, and also I hope that it could help in terms of other minority languages in Wales, of which Welsh is not the only one. I think it's important to say that. And there may be lessons we can bring across that help some of those smaller language communities in Wales.